Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/278

272 hadn't come out either for Chad or for him; Jim, in short, left the moral side to Sally, and indeed simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally's temper and will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of his wife's, and still further, if possible, in the rear of his sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and acclaimed, whereas the most a leading Woollett business man could hope to achieve socially, and, for that matter, industrially, was a certain freedom to play into this general glamour.

The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked our friend's road. It was a strange impression, especially as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and consentingly, though not quite wittingly, out of the question. It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett business man; and the determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual—as everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual was for leading Woollett business men to be out of the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it, with the fact of marriage. Would his relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim?

To turn his eyes in that direction was to be, personally, reassured; he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently; and he was held, after all, in higher